Glittering Vices Brazos Press, a Division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2020

SECOND EDITION

G LI T T E R I NG VICES

A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

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Preface vii Acknowledgments xi

1. Why Study the Vices? 1 2. Gifts from the Desert: The Origins and History of the Vices Tradition 21 3. Vainglory: Image Is Everything 41 4. Envy: Feeling Bitter When Others Have It Better 67 5. Sloth (Acedia): Resistance to the Demands of Love 87 6. Avarice: Possession and Mastery 111 7. Wrath: Holy Emotion or Hellish Passion? 137 8. Gluttony: Feeding Your Face and Starving Your Heart 163 9. Lust: Sexuality Stripped Down 189 10. The Rest of the Journey: Self-Examination, the Seven Capital Vices, and Spiritual Formation 217

Epilogue 235 Notes 243 Index 269

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Why Study the Vices?

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue. —Horace, Epistles

In the first year of my professional training in philosophy, I found myself in graduate school, wondering if I belonged somewhere else. Everyone in my classes seemed so smart, so witty, so well read, so eager and able to ask brilliant and insightful questions. I felt like an impostor. How did I— obviously so inferior—ever get admitted with these people? How soon would they find out who I really was (or wasn’t) and quietly shoo me out the back door in disgrace? Partly I struggled with genuinely difficult philosophical texts, and some difficult life circumstances; mostly, however, I struggled with my own sense of inadequacy. So instead of engaging in class discussions and seeking out opportunities to improve myself, I spent that first year of graduate school pulling back into the shadows, believing I had nothing much to contribute, hoping no one would notice when I wrote or said something stupid.1 A few years later, while reading Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of courage, I happened across a vice he called pusillanimity, which means “small- ness of soul.” Those afflicted by this vice, wrote Aquinas, shrink back from all that God has called them to be. When faced with the effort and

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difficulty of stretching themselves to the great things of which they are capable, they cringe and say, “I can’t.” Their faintheartedness comes from relying on their own puny powers and focusing on their own potential for failure, instead of counting on God’s grace to equip them for great kingdom work—work beyond anything they would have dreamed of for themselves. Picture Moses at the burning bush, said Aquinas. The future leader of Israel, called to lead them in one of the greatest episodes of their history—the exodus from Egypt—stands there stuttering that he’s not qualified and asks God to send Aaron instead. Reading Aquinas’s account of the vice of pusillanimity felt like seeing myself in the mirror for the first time. It gave a name to my struggle, one that made sense of my anxiety and sense of unworthiness. At the same time, the biblical portrait of Moses presented inspiring evidence that God’s power and grace can transform even—or especially—the weakest and most fearful of us.2 Moses’s pusillanimity did not have the last word in his life; God did. It’s a bit ironic, I suppose, that the discovery of this vice in myself turned out to be not only illuminating but also liberating. At last, I understood what held me back. Calling it by name was a small yet significant step toward gradually wresting free of its grip. It took a bracing word from Aquinas to show me that my fear of failure in graduate school was not the main problem; my pusillanimity was really a symptom of my lack of trust in God. How could I have missed something so basic? That I shrank back from all God called me to be and that I judged my own abilities as inadequate because I was not relying on God’s grace and strength—these insights are so obvious that I should have seen them for myself. Yet seeing ourselves clearly is often difficult. Sometimes we need to hear a precise diagnosis from someone else, and to hear it at a particular time. I have often joked that every time I read Aquinas I discover another vice I didn’t realize I had. Perhaps you don’t run the risk of becoming a moral hypochondriac who finds yourself guilty of a new sin every day. Nonethe- less, my sense is that most of us would benefit from some deeper moral reflection and self-examination—as I did in graduate school. A study of personal vices can catalyze spiritual growth, if it is done within the context of spiritual formation. In fact, the Christian tradition framed it that way from the beginning. My doorway into that tradition came through Aquinas. The project of spiritual formation finds a natural home in his work, since he does not organize his major text on the moral

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life around the vices, but rather around the virtues and spiritual gifts. Aquinas’s focus and framework point to the people of good character we are meant to become. As our primary task, we should pursue righteousness and moral excellence—not obsess over our weakness and sin. The second part of the Summa theologiae on the virtues and vices culminates in the third part on Christ, who perfectly models virtue and gives us his Spirit so that we can imitate his example. Along with Aquinas and many others in the Christian tradition whose insights he drew upon, then, the present study will examine the vices within the context of spiritual formation. Inspired by the wisdom of this rich community of thought and practice, this book offers conceptual tools to illuminate our personal stories, enables penetrating diagnoses of our struggles with the vices, and—most important—gives us a glimpse of life and virtue beyond the entrapments of sin.

Contemporary Treatments of the Seven Deadly Sins Reading Aquinas, I found the vices to have revealing and illuminating power. By contrast, many voices in contemporary culture dismiss, redefine, psychologize, or trivialize them. Some dismiss the vices on the grounds that they are not (or are no longer) moral problems at all. In a tract republished by NavPress, the Reverend James Stalker proclaims, “On the whole, I should be inclined to say, gluttony is a sin which the civilized man has outgrown; and there is not much need for referring to it in the pulpit.”3 Francine Prose, likewise, confuses gluttony with feasting in her chapter “Great Moments of Glut- tony,”4 and Robert Solomon questions “why God would bother to raise a celestial eyebrow” about the vices, given that “the ‘deadly sins’ barely jiggle the scales of justice”—as if sloth were nothing more than “a bloke who can’t get out of bed,” lust nothing more than “one too many peeks at a Playboy pictorial,” and gluttony nothing more than “scarf[ing] down three extra jelly doughnuts.”5 Businesses and philosophers alike commend envy as incentivizing competitiveness and motivating greater ambition.6 Dismissals of the vices as irrelevant or trivial would be serious charges indeed if they had anything much to do with the traditional conceptions of sloth, lust, gluttony, and the rest. Other authors attempt to redefine the seven vices as virtues—and to recommend them as such. In most of these cases too, what they are talking

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about has little or no relation to the original vice. For example, Michael Eric Dyson celebrates “black pride” in his book on the vice of pride.7 And Wendy Wasserstein’s hilarious parody of sloth offers a rigorous “self- improvement plan” for becoming lazier.8 As the book jacket promises, “To help you attain the perfect state of indolent bliss, the book offers a wealth of self-help aids. In it, readers will find the sloth songbook, sloth breakfast bars (with a delicious touch of Ambien), sloth documentaries (such as the author’s 12-hour epic on Thomas Aquinas), and the sloth network, programming guaranteed not to stimulate or challenge in any way.” Martin Marty reports that the French sent a delegation to the Vatican to get gluttony off the list, because la gourmandise (the French term usually translated as “gluttony”) connotes not gluttony but “a warmhearted approach to the table, to receiving and giving pleasure through good company and food.”9 Articles commending slothful sleep habits to overly busy Americans claim that more rest will boost our productivity.10 More perniciously, Simon Blackburn rejects altogether the notion of disordered sexual desire in his book on lust. “Everything is all right,” he reassures us. “By understanding it for what it is, we can reclaim lust for humanity, and we can learn that lust flourishes best when it is unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology, by falsities, by controls . . . which prevent its freedom of flow.”11 Elsewhere, the vices are psychologized. We think of gluttony as an old- fashioned name for various eating disorders; we turn to anger manage- ment seminars to address wrath. Serious reflection on pride gets replaced with talk of self-esteem and self-worth; vainglory reduces to narcissistic behavior or social media addictions; and we treat sloth on a spectrum from simple procrastination to serious depression. Psychologist Solomon Schimmel recounts a session with one Catholic patient who struggled with lust: “What were the effects of therapy? My client overcame unpleasant feelings about premarital sex with an affectionate companion who was also a marriage prospect. . . . Therapy made her much happier.”12 The general implication is that just as we have moved beyond the religious counsel of benighted ancient Christian monastics, so now we can safely leave behind any notion of the danger or significance of these “vices” as genuine moral or spiritual problems. I would argue that the complex integration of the psychological and spiritual in us deserves more serious consideration.13 If the vices are serious problems, then it is even worse to treat them as nothing but a matter of lighthearted humor (even if these treatments are

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genuinely funny). Evelyn Waugh remarks that the term “sloth” is “seldom on modern lips. When it is used, it is a mildly facetious variant on ‘indolence,’ and indolence, surely, so far from being a deadly sin, is one of the world’s most amiable of weaknesses. Most of the world’s troubles seem to come from people who are too busy. If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be”—in part, he goes on to argue, because then we wouldn’t make the effort to commit any of the really bad sins, such as pride.14 And in 1987, Harper’s magazine ran a feature called “You Can Have It All! Seven Campaigns for Deadly Sin,” in which seven Madison Avenue advertising agencies each created a print ad “selling” one of the seven vices. Sloth’s tagline reads, “If the original sin had been sloth, we’d still be in Paradise.” Santa Claus, “the world’s foremost authority,” soberly endorses greed: “Do you remember all those things you told me you wanted as a child? Well, your list may have changed, but I bet it hasn’t gotten any shorter.” And if lust needed a further recommendation, the ad offers this argument: “Any sin that’s enabled us to survive centuries of war, death, pestilence, and famine can’t be called deadly! Lust: where would be without it?”15 An Archie McFee catalog sells color-coded wristbands, themed for the seven vices, so you can “flaunt your fatal flaw”: wear red on wrathful days, green on envious days, and collect all seven for only $13.95. The website Seven Deadly Sins offers a “sinopsis” of each of the vices, including an explanation of why we commit them. We are greedy, for example, because we “live in possibly the most pampered, consumerist society since the Roman Empire”; prideful because our “well-meaning el- ementary school teachers told [us] to ‘believe in [ourselves]’”; and envious because “other people are so much luckier, smarter, more attractive, and better than we are.”16 Magazine articles, advertisements, and websites use the rubric of the sins as a rhetorical gimmick, recounting the “seven deadly sins” of everything from home remodeling (“don’t blow a gasket”), human resources, college teaching, and retirement planning, to backpacking and small-group ministry. Wines are christened after the seven (“Seven Deadly Zins” is, of course, a Zinfandel). Internet speculation links the seven vices to the seven dwarfs, the inhabitants of Gilligan’s Island, and even characters from SpongeBob SquarePants. And an ingenious cartoon links them to keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-S for pride, INSERT for lust, CTRL- ALT-DEL for wrath, CTRL-C for envy, NUM LOCK for greed, ESC for sloth) so you can commit all seven in a single day’s work at the office.17

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Most contemporary approaches to the vices, therefore, neither recognize nor respect the centuries of Christian teaching on the subject. It has all but vanished from view. If all we know about the vices comes from contemporary sources, we will probably oversimplify, stereotype, and scoff at moral problems or rationalize them away. It’s so easy to substitute silly or shallow parodies for the actual content of centuries of moral reflection by philosophers and theologians, contemplatives and spiritual directors. But if contemporary voices do indeed misunderstand the tradition, or pre sent only a shallow and dismissive reading of it, then in following them, we risk misunderstanding both our past and ourselves. If we did return to traditional sources to learn what gluttony is and what kind of power it can wield in us, would we find it so natural and unproblematic that vastly more Christians today are dieting than fasting? Could we be missing something here? It’s ironic that books about selfies and social media use line bookshelves everywhere, but no one has a name for the human hunger for recognition behind our mesmerized fascination with the self- images we create and curate with our phones. Would we see ourselves more clearly if we could add vainglory back into our current vocabulary and conceptual toolbox? An honest look at our own intellectual history requires that we listen carefully to the wisdom of the past. Unless we have some sense of what our own tradition has to say, Christians will not know how to engage contemporary challenges to historical conceptions of the vices. What is worth keeping and defending from the past? What insights might enrich our own spiritual formation and confessional practices? What concepts and definitions will enable us to recognize what’s missing and restore broken aspects of our world and culture? Most fundamentally, of course, a Christian understanding of these seven vices requires taking sin and vice to be genuine moral categories. This book aims both to take sin and spiritual formation seriously and to take centuries of Christian wisdom on the subject seriously as well.

Vices and Virtues In a book on the vices, we ought to be clear what a vice is. Moreover, how should we distinguish vices and virtues? And how does “vice” mean something different from “sin”? Understanding these terms will give us a foundation to explore the tradition and its history in the next chapter,

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where we will answer questions like these: Where did the list of vices come from? What does it mean to call some of them “capital vices” and some of them “deadly sins”? Which ones should we single out as “capital,” which as “deadly,” and why? We begin here, however, with the concept of vice itself. Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns out to be important. A vice (or its counterpart, a virtue), first of all, is a habit or a character trait. Unlike something we are born with—such as an outgoing personality or a predisposition to have high cholesterol levels—virtues and vices count as moral qualities. We can cultivate habits or break them down over time through our repeated actions. While we can’t become more generous, for example, in a single day by simply willing to be so or by doing one generous thing, we can deliberately make repeated choices and engage in regular practices that develop that virtue. That is, we have a kind of indirect vol- untary control over such habits. Thus, as the Greek philosopher Aristotle puts it, we are ultimately responsible for our character. By way of an analogy, think of a winter sledding party in which a group of people head out to smooth a path through freshly fallen snow. The first sled goes down slowly, carving out a rut. Other sleds follow, over and over, down the same path, smoothing and packing down the snow. After many trips a well-worn groove develops, a path out of which it is hard to steer. The groove enables sleds to stay aligned and on course, gliding rapidly, smoothly, and easily on their way. Character traits function like that: the first run down, which required some effort and tough going, gradually becomes a smooth track that we glide down without further intentional steering.18 Of course, a rider can always stick out a boot and throw the sled off course, usually damaging the track as well. So too we can act out of character, even after being in the groove for a long time. In general, however, habits incline us swiftly, smoothly, and reliably toward certain types of action. Virtues are “excellences” of character, habits or dispositions of character that help us live well as excellent human beings. So, for example, having the virtue of courage enables us to stand firm in a good purpose amid pain or difficulty, when someone without the virtue would run away or give up. A courageous friend stands up for us when our reputation is unfairly maligned, despite risk to his own personal or professional reputation; a courageous mother cares for her sick child through inconvenience, sleep- less nights, and exposure to disease. Courageous people stay faithful to

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other people and to their commitments when the going gets rough. Having courage, like all the virtues, enables the loving, trusting, and secure human relationships that are essential to a good human life. Courageous individuals still count as admirable people even when their good purposes are thwarted: when the friend’s reputation becomes unfairly tarnished or when the sick child does not recover. We still think it is better to be the sort of parent who suffers for and with her sick child than to be the sort of parent who can’t handle sacrifice and abandons the hard work of caregiving. So virtue helps us both to live and to act well and to be good people (that’s Aristotle again).19 The vices, by contrast, are corruptive and destructive habits. They undermine both our goodness of character and our living and acting well. In the chapters that follow, we will examine how wrath, lust, gluttony, and all the others have a corrosive effect on our lives—how they eat away at our ability to see things clearly, to appreciate things as we ought, to love and live in healthy relationships with others, and to refrain from self-destructive patterns of behavior. As we gradually internalize virtues and vices through years of formation, they become firm and settled parts of our character. It’s common to develop habits by imitating those around us or following their instruction. We may or may not be intentional about all of our habit formation. For example, most children develop habits by imitating their parents, and in this way both virtues and vices can “rub off,” so to speak. Habit formation is the cumulative effect of multiple exposures and many small, casual choices, similar to developing a habit of swearing or smoking, or beginning the day with a cup of coffee or a fitness routine. Psychologists confirm that we need regular repetition (forty to sixty days, approximately) to build a habit. Someone who wants to break an old (bad) habit, however, may need even more serious deliberation and self-discipline. Sometimes we have a crisis that brings a new perspective. We see ourselves as if for the first time and want to change. But to make good on that desire to change, we have to wrestle daily out of a deeply ingrained groove—sometimes even for the rest of our lives. Very simply, we acquire a virtue (or vice) through practice—repeated activity that increases our proficiency and ease at the activity and gradually forms our character. Alasdair MacIntyre describes a child learning to play chess to illustrate the process of habit formation.20 Imagine, writes MacIntyre, that in hopes of teaching an uninterested seven-year-old to play chess, you offer the child candy—one piece if he plays and another if he

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wins the game. Motivated by his sweet tooth, the child agrees. At first, he plays for the candy alone. At this stage, he will cheat to win, in order to get more candy. But the more the child plays, the better at chess he gets. And the better at chess he gets, the more he enjoys playing, eventually coming to enjoy the game for itself. At this point in the process, he no longer plays for the candy; now the child plays because he enjoys chess and delights in excellent play. Because he has now gained a practitioner’s inside view, he understands both the intrinsic value of the game and the way cheating will rob him of that. He has become a chess player. Moral formation in virtue works much the same way. We often need external incentives and sanctions to get us through the initial stages of the process, when our untutored impulses and entrenched desires still pull us toward the opposite behavior. But with encouragement, discipline, and often a role model or mentor, practice eventually makes things feel more natural and enjoyable. Through that practice, moreover, we gradually develop the internal values and desires corresponding to our outward behavior. Virtue often develops, that is, from the outside in. That’s why, when we want to re-form our character from vice to virtue, we often need to practice and persevere in regular spiritual disciplines and formational practices for a lengthy period of time. There is no quick and easy substitute for daily repetition over the long haul. First we have to pull the sled out of the old rut, and then gradually build up a new track. As with most human endeavors, we usually do not do this alone. Our parents, obviously, contribute deeply to our character formation, but so do friends, mentors, social networks (local and digital), historical figures, and the community of saints past and present. If we marry, our spouse will shape our character, as will our teachers, and the fictional characters we watch and read about and find inspiring. Our coworkers influence our habit formation, and so do the peers with whom we spend the most time. This is why good parents care so much about whom their children choose as friends. When we make a new resolution or try to cultivate a new habit, having a community back us, or even a single partner with whom to practice or from whom to learn, can make all the difference. In the end, both virtues and vices are habits that can eventually become “natural” to us. Philosophers (most famously, perhaps, Plato in the Republic) describe the perfect achievement of virtue as yielding internal harmony and integrity. Compare, for example, the following two married persons: The first, we’ll call Jane. Although she resists them, Jane regularly

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struggles with sexual feelings for men other than her husband. The second, call him Joe, has enjoyed an ardent affection for his wife throughout the ups and downs of thirty years of marriage. Are they both faithful? In a technical sense at least, yes. Jane successfully exercises self-control over her wayward desires. But only Joe embodies fidelity as a virtue. His faithfulness has taken deep root in who he is. While we can certainly give her moral credit for her efforts, Jane’s faithfulness stays on the surface, as the uncomfortable voice of conscience countering her wayward inclinations and keeping her actions in check.21 By contrast, Joe’s desires harmonize fully with his considered judgment.22 Who wouldn’t rather have a spouse with Joe’s fidelity than Jane’s self-control? Aristotle called this the difference between acting according to virtue (that is, according to an external standard that tells us what we ought to do, regardless of whether we feel like it) and acting from virtue (that is, from the internalized disposition that naturally yields its corresponding action).23 The person who acts from virtue performs actions that fit seam- lessly with his or her inward character. Thus, the telltale sign of virtue is doing the right thing with a sense of peace and pleasure. What feels like second nature to you?24 These are the marks of your character.

Virtues and Virtuous Character As the previous examples make clear, it’s not enough merely to want to be virtuous, or to wish we had greater harmony between our motivation and our action. We can aspire to be good people with virtuous character, or desire not to be so corrupt or weak, but not yet have a clear sense of how to achieve those goals. “Cultivate good character” will remain nothing more than an empty prescription if we don’t know what good character amounts to and how to cultivate it. We need to be able to pinpoint our shortcomings and set our sights on specific objectives. If cultivating virtue and avoiding vice is the key to moral formation, then we need to know first of all what the particular virtues and vices are. When I ask my students and friends to list various virtues, they invari- ably name things like honesty, courage, compassion, and generosity; for the vices, the list usually includes qualities like cowardice, greed, and selfishness. A Newsweek article on character education came up with this list of virtues: “prudence, respect, loyalty, love, justice, courage, hope, honesty, compassion, fairness, and self-control.”25 Both lists capture traits

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that psychologists call “character strengths” and “core virtues,” as does the list made famous by Petersen and Seligman:

Wisdom and Knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective, innovation Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality, zest Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence Justice: citizenship, fairness, leadership Temperance: forgiveness and mercy, humility, prudence, self-control Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality26

Answers like these are generally on the right track. Despite our distance from traditions of ethics centered on the virtues and vices, we retain a sense of what should count. But why privilege one list over another? What makes one list a random collection and another an ordered set? The lists compiled by my students and contemporary psychologists alike usually share an important feature with the lists that come out of the Christian virtue tradition. The process of compiling lists of virtues (and vices) implicitly starts with thinking about moral ideals embodied in heroes, saints, or cultural icons (or villains). We implicitly draw our lists from a mental picture of someone we admire (or despise) as an example of moral excellence (or corruption). Role models who embody a moral ideal anchor our moral education into the virtues (or vices), since we typically learn and acquire character traits by observing and imitating others.27 From those models or ideals, we can then analyze more specifically what we find admirable or dishonorable about that person’s character. A United States Marine embodies honor, courage, and fidelity; an Olympic athlete embodies perseverance and hope; a family practice doctor embodies compassion and wisdom; saints such as Mother Teresa are a model of humility and mercy; civic heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln are a picture of justice and courage. The Christian tradition also explicitly names one principal role model, a picture of perfected human nature, the image of God redeemed and restored, the one to be emulated by all human beings. As Aquinas writes, “Our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ . . . showed us in His own person the way of truth.”28 Christ’s life and ministry model the virtues for us. We

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must rely on the grace and power of the Holy Spirit to make progress in our imitation of him (see, e.g., 2 Pet. 1:3–11). How do Christ’s example and the work of grace shape a Christian view of virtues and vices?29 A Christian rendering of temperance, for example, will have to include not only moderating our desire for food for the sake of health and social mores but also religious reasons for fasting and feasting. Likewise, the virtue of courage challenges us to endure suffering for the sake of love, relying on God’s strength, even to the point of martyrdom—a stark contrast to contemporary portraits of brave individuals charging the enemy alone with guns ablaze. Christ teaches us too how gentleness and humility ground righteous anger, enabling us both to turn over tables of injustice and to turn the other cheek. The tradition eventually singled out seven virtues—three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) and four cardinal virtues (practical wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance). Everyone who wants to become Christ- like must seek to cultivate these qualities of character, whatever his or her culture and calling. Together, the seven virtues yield a holistic picture of human perfection. They cover every aspect of our nature, from our mind to our will to our emotions, and direct them all toward a life of flourish- ing in relationship with God. According to the Christian tradition, we all need faith, hope, and love, as well as practical wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance, in order to become all God intended us to be as human beings. Of course, courage can be manifested in different ways at different times—on a battlefield or in an emergency room—but no one can hold firmly to the good in the face of pain and difficulty without it. Chastity, a part of temperance, can be fulfilled through marriage, celibacy, or years of singleness, but all are called to order sexual desire in ways that serve love and faithfulness. In a parallel way, the seven vices depict the traits of character to which we must die. Only when we lay them down and leave them behind can we flourish as people with well-formed character and Christlike virtue.

Why Study the Vices Today? Other than piquing our historical interest or prompting an internet search for curiosity’s sake, is there good reason to try to recover the traditional Christian view of the vices? I would argue that Christians gain both intellectual and practical payoff—in the way we understand ourselves and

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our world, and in the way our practices and prayers are reshaped. But for non-Christians as well, the traditional view of the vices has the power to illuminate. This tradition has deeply shaped Western culture. To understand its influence—whether we accept or reject it—is to better understand ourselves. I’ll begin in what follows with several reasons that should appeal to both believers and nonbelievers. First, the seven vices reveal perennial features of human nature, with its weaknesses and temptations, as reflected in films, literature, theater, music, and art. Studying the vices can help us uncover layers of depth and significance in iconic contemporary stories and culture. Shakespearean characters from Iago to Shylock show us the ugly face of envy and the callousness of greed. Tales from Tolkien’s Mordor to the murder plots in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and modern-day Game of Thrones all depict pride and the lust for power—mirroring the same libido dominandi that St. Augustine iden- tified in Roman culture more than a millennium before. In a lighter but no less malicious vein, the original story line of The Incredibles traded on the envy of superhero sidekick-wannabe Buddy (who later becomes the self-made superhero Syndrome). His character gets revenge by killing off the competition and leveling the playing field, so “when everyone is super, then no one will be.” In the classic fairy tale Snow White, the evil queen shows us how vainglory feeds on pride and envy, the same unholy trinity of vices that Gregory the Great depicted in the sixth century. The queen wants to be the most beautiful, but she needs the mirror to affirm and recognize her status and beauty, and she will destroy the competition to secure first place. On the big screen, Captain Barbossa’s story of the Aztec gold captures the empty restlessness of greed with haunting accuracy in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Find it, we did. There be the chest. Inside be the gold. And we took ’em all! We spent ’em, and traded ’em. And frittered ’em away on drink and food and pleasurable company. The more we gave ’em away, the more we came to realize . . . the drink would not satisfy. Food turned to ash in our mouths. And all the pleasurable company in the world could not slake our lust. We are cursed men. . . . Compelled by greed we were, but now we are consumed by it.30

In fiction, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh paints a portrait of the vice of sloth in explicitly religious terms (although narrated by an agnostic character), and the family name Waugh chooses in the novel—Flyte— stands

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for one of sloth’s most common symptoms, escapism or flight. Long before today’s abundant testimonies of the addictive power of pornography, Alan Paton’s story Too Late the Phalarope offered a haunting case study of the binding and blinding power of lust and its power to destroy human relationships. And Lady Gaga has made a career out of spectacle, taking vainglory as the theme of entire albums and illustrating its extremes in her outrageous costuming. The vices also offer us a framework for explaining and evaluating common cultural practices. Envy and its offspring vice Schadenfreude—joy at another’s misfortune—go a long way toward explaining the popularity of tabloids that expose and trumpet the cellulite and poor fashion choices of the rich and famous. Reality shows of the makeover variety, which spawned a boom in cosmetic surgery, pay tribute to the power of vainglory and the image-driven advertising industry that feeds it. Action-adventure films’ for- mula for box-office success depends on the celebration of wrathful revenge in the guise of righteous anger, while prime-time talent shows and political commentary alike trade in contempt. Corporate workaholic culture depends on a secularized notion of sloth and mistakenly glorifies frantic industriousness as its opposing virtue. Modern-day gluttony drives inventions like diet soda, which we can drink guilt-free as we consume ever-expanding portion sizes and supersized menu options. Video games marketed to pre- teens feature avatars with exaggerated, pornified bodily features, warping their imaginations and expectations, while our late-night internet habits drive an appetite for increasingly violent filmic depictions of sex. Most importantly, however, understanding the vices can yield personal, spiritual rewards. The historical Christian figures treated in this book— Evagrius, Cassian, Theodora, Syncletica, Gregory, Aquinas—offered little overt cultural criticism. Instead, they wrote to instruct others in a well- examined life of intentional Christian discipleship. Aquinas, for example, makes the virtues the key building blocks of a Christian life, while the vices describe our greatest moral and spiritual pitfalls. Becoming holy involves shedding our sinful nature—the vices—and “clothing ourselves” with the character of Christ, the perfect exemplar of virtue.31 The Christian tradition follows the apostle Paul’s old-self/new-self distinction when it describes the transformation of our character from vice to virtue.

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the

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attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Eph. 4:22–24 NIV)

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). . . . These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. . . . Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. . . . As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. . . . Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Col. 3:5–14)

In other words, the moral project for a Christian is to die to the old self and rise to new life in Christ. (The word “moral” comes from a Latin root referring to what we have become accustomed to.) Dying and rising—the rhythm of a life of discipleship—names the process by which we grow accustomed to a life more and more like Christ’s. Centuries before the advent of Christianity, Aristotle wrote that virtues and vices describe aspects of our character that become second nature to us. This makes the vices especially apt for describing our old sinful nature, and the virtues, for describing our new nature in Christ. Thus, Christian thinkers from Augustine through Aquinas overwhelmingly adopted the Greek language of virtue and vice to describe the moral life and the development of Christian character.32 Romans 12:1–2 commends transformation into godly character, calling us to turn away from our previous conformity to the patterns of this world, and the rest of the chapter makes clear that this involves both renewed minds and an entire way of life. All these texts instruct us to take off our old nature, described in terms of the vices, and to put on Christlikeness— that is, the virtues. The model of character change as moral and spiritual formation therefore neatly fits the theological idea of transformation from the “old self” into a renewed and sanctified person: a “new self,” re-created by the Spirit in the image of Christ. In the rhythm of sanctification, we are first invited into the movement of dying. The practice of regular confession enacts the “dying” part of the life- long turning away from the broken, bitter, selfishly resistant selves we have become. We come as though to the edge of our own graves and renounce our old self with its habits and practices. Yet that renunciation, as a preface to new life, requires knowing our sin. The tradition of the seven vices began

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with this insight. The desert fathers and mothers first classified the vices within a Christian program of self-examination and spiritual direction in the fourth century. It continued to provide an almost ubiquitous rubric for confession in penitential manuals up until the fifteenth century—an endur- ance that testifies to its diagnostic power as a spiritual tool for contrition and repentance, renewal and spiritual growth. When we study the vices, we learn to better articulate which parts of our sinful nature we are grappling with and need to put to death. The tradition teaches us to recognize how one vice might variously reveal itself in feelings and actions. With their help, we can use the list of vices to identify networks of sin in our lives and unveil layers of sin of which we were previously unaware. Naming the vices fine-tunes our confession. Rather than praying in general for forgiveness of sin, or reducing all our sin to pride or generic selfishness, we can lay specific sins before God, ask for the grace to root them out, and engage in daily disciplines—both individually and communally—that help us target them. Naming our sins is the confessional counterpart to counting our blessings. Such articulations enrich and refresh our practices of prayer and contrition and lead us to deeper engagement in the spiritual disciplines. Retrieving the tradition of virtues and vices can also give us fresh eyes and expose new layers of meaning in our reading of Scripture. Before I read Aquinas on sloth, I would have associated this vice with only a few prov- erbs about sluggards and perhaps also the parable of the talents. A closer study of sloth helped me to see it in the Israelites’ resistance to embracing their new home in the promised land, and in Lot’s wife turning back to the familiarity of Sodom while angels attempted to rescue her. And in Psalm 119 I discovered a model of its remedy. Similarly, understanding the distinction between wrath and righteous anger helps us understand how Jesus integrated justice and love—how he could burn with anger against the Pharisees’ calloused hearts and then forgive those who crucify him. Study- ing avarice illuminates deeper themes of provision and trust throughout Scripture, from the story of the widow of Zarephath to counsels against worry in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Once we grasp the envy-charity link, we gain new insight into the depths of the brothers’ antipathy toward Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, and its prophetic resonance in Jesus’s interac- tions with the religious leaders of his day. Finally, if we’re able to identify our own sins more accurately, we’ll be better equipped to reflect on and engage with the world around us. What areas of moral complicity or compromise in our own lives are we blithely

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unaware of? Is our apparent zeal for justice in the political arena really a mask for fear or a wrathful bid for control? What cues might help us unveil the real hearts lying behind our red-hot rhetoric? What can vainglory teach us about our need to present ourselves as Pinterest-perfect and problem-free, even in church? Consider contemporary American culture, torn between relentless workaholism on the one hand and an obsession with maximizing leisure on the other: What compulsions fuel this cultural ethos? Should Christians endorse the limitless pursuit of work as selfless diligence and godly industriousness? Or might they find in these lifestyles evidence of cravings for control, self-sufficiency, and a refusal to depend on and rest in God? Perhaps our drivenness, even more than our pursuit of leisure, is more like vice than virtue. Perhaps. Human culture and motivations are notoriously difficult to penetrate, even—or especially—when they have become our own. “The heart is deceitful above all things. . . . Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9 NIV). Why not, then, avail ourselves of the historical perspective and col- lective wisdom of the Christian tradition to help us see and know ourselves more truly? The project of becoming like Christ is our life’s most important task. It makes sense to use every resource we can find to help us do it well. The whole story of human sin and failure cannot be told comprehensively by our contemporaries or invented anew by our own imaginations. We should certainly value contemporary reflection and our own insight. But when we seek moral advice, attentiveness to a wider perspective often helps reveal what our myopic view would have missed. When we listen attentively to the experienced, the devout, and the saints and sages of past centuries, we can find wisdom and insight that still lights our way today. C. S. Lewis once said, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”33 When we recognize our vices for what they are, we take a first step toward turning to the sea. When we see the drabness of the slum for what it really is, we can countenance preferring a vibrantly beautiful seashore. Once we identify our moral corruption as a muddy puddle we want to leave behind, we are faced with the challenge of re-forming our habits from vice into virtue—first getting our feet sandy and then venturing out far enough to learn to swim. Looking out at the sea, at its vastness, power, and beauty, we inevitably confront our deep need for grace.

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Dante Alighieri outlines the same movement in his Divine Comedy. Pre- cisely through practices designed to turn them away from their old habits, sinners are prepared to welcome and live into new life. As they come to grasp the true nature of their offenses, they can be gradually weaned from their distorted desires. This process bears fruit in a joyful life and a loving relationship with God.34

In the next chapter, we trace the history and origins of the list of virtues and the list of vices. This history reveals why the infamous list of seven vices is a distinctively Christian contribution. We will also seek to understand why certain vices made the list, why we are better off calling them “capital” than “deadly,” and what common theme explains their twisted but seductive search for happiness. Most importantly, this intriguing story shows us how self-examination using the vices works within the framework of spiritual formation, and how—centuries later—it can still serve that end for us.

FURTHER REFLECTION

1. When you look “in the mirror” at your heart, your mind, and your life, what do you see? (We will return to this question in the epilogue.) What aspects of your character have been areas of persistent struggle for you (like the author’s pusillanimity in graduate school)?

2. How accustomed are you to the language of virtue and vice? Is talk about character formation or spiritual formation a foreign or familiar way to think about the “old self” and the “new self”?

3. Whom do you envision when you picture Christlike or virtuous character? Who is someone who models Christian “love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Col. 3:14) in your life? Why might it be important in our character formation to have before us a positive vision of a virtuous life?

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